The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood

1 NAME _____ MOD _____ Ms. Pojer AHAP HGHS. The Cult of Domesticity and true Womanhood The Cult of Domesticity & true Womanhood Defined: Between 1820 and the Civil War, the growth of new industries, businesses, and professions helped to create in America a new middle class. (The Middle class consisted of families whose husbands worked as lawyers, office workers, factory managers, merchants, teachers, physicians and others.). Although the new middle-class family had its roots in preindustrial society, it differed from the preindustrial family in three major ways: I) A nineteenth-century middle-class family did not have to make what it needed in order to survive. Men could work in jobs that produced goods or services while their wives and children stayed at home. 2) When husbands went off to work, they helped create the view that men alone should support the family. This belief held that the world of work, the public sphere, was a rough world, where a man did what he had to in order to succeed, that it was full of temptations, violence, and trouble.

2 A. woman who ventured out into such a world could easily fall Charles Dana Gibson, No Time for Politics, prey to it, for women were weak and delicate creatures. A. 1910. woman's place was therefore in the private sphere, in the home, where she took charge of all that went on. 3) The middle-class family came to look at itself, and at the nuclear family in general, as the backbone of society. Kin and community remained important, but not nearly so much as they had once been. A new ideal of Womanhood and a new ideology about the home arose out of the new attitudes about work and family. Called the "cult of Domesticity ," it is found in women's magazines, advice books, religious journals, newspapers, fiction--everywhere in popular culture. This new ideal provided a new view of women's duty and role while cataloging the cardinal virtues of true Womanhood for a new age. This ideal of Womanhood had essentially four parts--four characteristics any good and proper young woman should cultivate: piety, purity, Domesticity , and submissiveness.

3 Ideal Number One: Piety: Nineteenth-century Americans believed that women had a particular propensity for religion. The modern young woman of the 1820s and 1830s was thought of as a new Eve working with God to bring the world out of sin through her suffering, through her pure, and passionless love. Religion was thought to be a good thing in women, a salve for a potentially restless mind, an occupation which could be undertaken within woman's proper sphere--the home. The early women's seminaries and academies, which were under attack for leading women astray from their true purpose and task in life, promised that far from taking women away from religion, they would make of young women handmaidens of God, efficient auxiliaries in the great task of renovating the world. Irreligion in females was considered "the most revolting human characteristic." Indeed, it was said that "godless, no woman, mother tho she be.". Ideal Number Two: Purity: Female purity was also highly revered.

4 Without sexual purity, a woman was no woman, but rather a lower form of being, a "fallen woman," unworthy of the love of her sex and unfit for their company. To contemplate the loss of one's purity brought tears and hysteria to young women. This made it a little difficult, and certainly a bit confusing, to contemplate one's marriage, for in popular literature, the marriage night was advertised as the greatest night in a woman's life, the night when she bestowed upon her husband her greatest treasure, her virginity. From thence onward, she was dependent upon him, an empty vessel without legal or emotional existence of her own. A woman must guard her treasure with her life. Despite any male attempt to assault her, she must remain pure and chaste. She must not give in, must not give her treasure into the wrong hands. The following is advice on how to protect oneself and one's treasure given by Mrs. Eliza Farrar, author of The Young Woman's Friend: "sit not with another in a place that is too narrow; read not out of the same book; let not your eagerness to see anything induce you to place your head close to another person's.

5 ". To ignore such advice was to court disaster. The consequences could be terrible--usually, in popular literature, a woman who allowed herself to be seduced by a man atoned for her sin by dying, most often in poverty, depravity, or intemperance. There were numerous stories about unwed mothers punished by God for their sin by losing their babies and going mad. Female purity was also viewed as a weapon, to be used by good women to keep men in control of their sexual needs and desires, all for their own good. A woman's only power was seen as coming through her careful use of sexual virtue. Note the following quote from a popular ladies magazine: "the man bears rule over his wife's person and conduct. She bears rule over his inclinations: he governs by law; she by empire of women is the empire of softness, her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.". American culture of the early nineteenth century underwent a purity fetish, such that it touched even the language of the day, popular decorating, and myths.

6 This is when Americans began to talk about limbs for legs (even when referring to the legs of chairs) and white meat instead of breast meat (in fowl)--this is the language of repression. This is when women began to decorate the limbs of chairs, pianos, tables, to cover them with fabric so that one would not be reminded of legs. Proper women were admonished to separate male and female authors on bookcases, unless, of course, they were married to each other. This is also when myth of stork bringing babies emerges, and that babies came from cabbage patches. Ideal Number Three: Submissiveness This was perhaps the most feminine of virtues. Men were supposed to be religious, although not generally. Men were supposed to be pure, although one could really not expect it. But men never supposed to be submissive. Men were to be movers, and doers--the actors in life. Women were to be passive bystanders, submitting to fate, to duty, to God, and to men.

7 Women were warned that this was the order of things. The Young Ladies Book summarized for the unknowledgeable, the passive virtues necessary in women: "It is certain that in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind are required of her.". Just in case she might not get the point, female submissiveness and passivity were assured for the nineteenth century woman by the clothing she was required to wear. Tight corset lacing closed off her lungs and pinched her inner organs together. Large numbers of under garments and the weight of over dresses limited her physical mobility. A true woman knew her place, and knew what qualities were wanted in her opposite. Said George Burnap, in The Sphere and Duties of Woman: "She feels herself weak and timid. She needs a protector. She is in a measure dependent. She asks for wisdom, constancy, firmness, perseveredness, and she is willing to repay it all by the surrender of the full treasure of her affection.

8 Women despise in men everything like themselves except a tender heart. It is enough that she is effeminate and weak; she does not want another like herself.". Such views were commonplace. A number of popular sayings reiterated: "A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can, but she is conscious of her inferiority and therefore grateful for support." "A woman has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love." " true feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.". Ideal Number Four: Domesticity : Woman's place was in the home. Woman's role was to be busy at those morally uplifting tasks aimed at maintaining and fulfilling her piety and purity. Housework was deemed such an uplifting task. Godey's Ladies Book argued, "There is more to be learned about pouring out tea and coffee than most young ladies are willing to believe." Needlework and crafts were also approved activities which kept women in the home, busy about her tasks of wifely duties and childcare, keeping the home a cheerful, peaceful place which would attract men away from the evils of the outer world.

9 For the true woman, a woman's rights were as follows: The right to love whom others scorn, The right to comfort and to mourn, The right to shed new joy on earth, The right to feel the soul's high worth, Such woman's rights a God will bless And crown their champions with success. The Cult of Domesticity developed as family lost its function as economic unit. Many of links between family and community closed off as work left home. Emergence of market economy and the devaluation of women's work. Increasingly, then, home became a self-contained unit. Privacy was a crucial issue for nineteenth-century families, and can see this concern in the spatial development of suburbs in urban areas as families sought single family dwellings were they could be even more isolated from others. Women remained in the home, as a kind of cultural hostage. Women were expected to uphold the values of stability, morality, and democracy by making the home a special place, a refuge from the world where her husband could escape from the highly competitive, unstable, immoral world of business and industry.

10 It was widely expected that in order to succeed in the work world, men had to adopt certain values and behaviors: materialism, aggression, vulgarity, hardness, rationality. But men also needed to develop another side to their nature, a human side, an anticompetitive side. The home was to be the place where they could do this. This was where they could express humanistic values, aesthetic values, love, honor, loyalty and faithfulness. The home was no longer a unit valued for its function in the community (or its economic productiveness), but rather for its isolation from the community and its service to its members. Because the world of work was defined as male, the world of the home was defined as female. Part of its value lay in its leisurely aspects. Women increasingly became a complement to leisure, a kind of useless but beautiful object, set off by her special setting. The nineteenth-century household was cluttered with beautiful, ornate objects-- elaborate patterns in cloth covering walls, ornate furniture, pianos, paintings, and brick-a-brack.